Looking for recommendations of strong schools that accept lower SAT scores, if the student has good EC’s, grades, and strong letters of recommendation.
You should try the ACT. Assuming you have a strong GPA, look at Wake Forest (test optional), Oxford College at Emory, and General Studies at NYU. Also, find some good in-state safeties.
What is your budget?
What is your child’s major and career goal?
There are many “strong schools” that will accept your child. However, you may be looking at the wrong schools (I see that you’re looking at Tulane, UF, and UTexas) and you’re OOS for UT and UF. Very doubtful that your child would get accepted to any of those schools w/o some hook.
However, if money is no object, then there are Test Optional schools that she should consider. And there are probably many smaller privates that are ranked below Tulane that look at apps more holistically.
I’m not sure what you mean by “strong schools”…Any good school will have a variety of strong majors, particularly if an academic major is chosen (like English, History, Classics, Philosophy, Bio, Chem, Math, Chem, etc), rather than a “lighter major”.
See if the rest of the student’s profile compares favorably to those of the students at a school such as Bates. If this is the case, then Bates and other test-optional schools could be appropriate places to look.
Look at test optional colleges and see which ones look like good matches for her academics, interests, geographic desires etc. There are many fine colleges and universities on the list.
http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional/state